ATI Radeon X1900XT 256MB

24" Widescreen Gaming

For gameplay evaluations on a CRT monitor, please head straight to our CRT performance section.

The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion

Publisher: 2K Games

We used the latest addition to the impressive Elder Scrolls series of titles, Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion with the 1.1 patch applied. It uses the Gamebyro engine and features DirectX 9.0 shaders, the Havok physics engine and Bethesda use SpeedTree for rendering the trees. The world is made up of trees, stunning landscapes, lush grass and features High Dynamic Range (HDR) lighting and soft shadowing. If you want to learn more about The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion, we recommend giving our graphics and gameplay review a read.

The graphics options are hugely comprehensive, with four screens of options available for you to tweak to your heart's content. There is also the configuration file too, but we've kept things as simple as possible by leaving that in its out of the box state. For our testing, we did several manual run throughs to test the game in a variety of scenarios ranging from large amounts of draw distance, indoors and also large amounts of vegetation. Our vegetation run through is the result that we have shown, as it proved to be the most stressful - we walked up the hill to Kvach, where the first Oblivion gate is located.



At higher resolution, we found that we had to lower the texture detail on the Radeon X1900XT 256MB in order to maintain a smooth gaming experience. With large texture details applied, we experienced some stuttering when we changed directions or entered new areas of the game - it was clear that the card was suffering from a lack of on-board memory. With that exception along with a slighly lower shadow detail, the gaming experience delivered by ATI's Radeon X1900XT 256MB was virtually exactly the same as the experience delivered by its 512MB sibling.

Again, the two Radeons delivered a better overall experience because the cards were capable of HDR and anti-aliasing at the same time. The XFX GeForce 7950 GT 570M Extreme wasn't a bad performer though, it just lacked some anti-aliasing. While anti-aliasing doesn't make a massive difference in rural areas, it can make a huge difference in built up areas.